


I'm almost me again, she's almost you

by definitely_not_an_alb



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Abdul is also dead :(, Abigail Kamara | Minor Appearance, Alternative Universe - A Memory called Empire Fusion, Alternative Universe - Imago Machines, Author choose not to warn because this is some weird shit, Death, Future Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Jennifer Vaughan | Minor Appearance, Narrator is experiencing identity troubles please stand by, No AMCE Knowledge required, Peter and Thomas are both dead, Rated for Existential Dread, This is a Trill AU but slightly to the right, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28915158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/definitely_not_an_alb/pseuds/definitely_not_an_alb
Summary: The truth is, no amount of remembering thatany apparent future expressions of personal opinion or emotion or attachment not pertaining to specific memories are purely reconstructed extrapolations by the current personalities’ creativity based on the data availableprepared me for hearing the new voice in my mind that spoke in a perfect RP accent and wasn’t me and was me sayMy Condolences.
Relationships: Original Female Character & Peter Grant, Original Female Character & Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale, Peter Grant & Thomas Nightingale
Kudos: 8





	I'm almost me again, she's almost you

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [@haiironoaki](https://haiironoaki.tumblr.com/) and [@gaymelie](https://gaymelie.tumblr.com/) for Beta Work and cheering me on!
> 
> In _A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine_ , the people of the Stations record their lives on Imago Machines, which can be passed on to the next generation containing the previous generation’s collective knowledge and skills. Personality, however, cannot be separated from skill or memory, which is why matching with a future Inheritor happens based on shared personality and why the people of Lsel Station have 'perfected the art of psychology' to bridge the gap of time between receiving an Imago and full integration into the new, current personality.
> 
> The British, however, are only on the third generation, not the 14th and also, well, British. Cut them some slack.

I have the suspicion I reconstructed all our first meetings retroactively, but I can’t ever be sure – the mind is a curiously wonderful thing, and memory is fickle, as they say. It does not like to recall what is confusing and impossible. And none of us can ever record what the first time doing magic feels like. I hope one day I can, instead of just remembering that I remember. It would certainly make it all so much easier.

It was strange – it’s always strange again, and nothing can prepare you for the strangeness – of going into that last surgery as myself, alone my entire life with the voice in my head that was me, and waking up as I.

Plural.

‘Hi there.’, I remember saying tentatively. And then, feeling for the first time again a body off-kilter, like finding that putting your shoes on the wrong way around hadn't been the problem, they'd just somehow shrunk three sizes overnight.

<Oh. You're a girl. Woman.>

‘Yeah.’, I said, looking down on my new fingers, darker and more slender, and two braids thick as my – new – wrists hanging almost to my lap. It wasn't going to be a problem, I knew without asking, <just – surprising is all.>

<I didn't know hair could be that heavy.>, I said, and I said ‘It's a pain in the ass, but totally worth it.’

There was a moment of silence while I screwed my eyes shut and tried to sort out the itchy seams of two minds grinding up against themselves like meeting continental plates that hadn't yet decided which one wanted to go which way.

I wasn't scared.

I’d read the debriefings and reports – even then, still frustratingly vague – and the papers and personality profiles that were part of my psychological prep. I hadn’t known what had been more unsettling, more _sinister_ , Grant’s stacks and stacks of semi-covert operation (you always want to believe your government isn’t like that, and yet you know better, I had thought to myself) and internal investigations (at least there had been investigations) or Nightingale’s in comparison barely-there sliver of a folder – 7 decades of service hidden in the giant gaps around a small sliver of land in Germany, innocuous only so long as you don’t look it up on a map. There was still a lot of it, mind you. But it had that taste about it. It would be wrong to think of these reports as smiling at me, but as I started to try and think of them as things _I_ would have done, I couldn’t help but bump into the gaps in the histories.

I think I remember – my memory of that time being ironically spotty – when I was in the hospital, recovering from the installation of the net of wires that would allow them to record the impressions of my mind and would let me access the recording of another, spending hours staring at the walls, the ceiling, thinking. Worrying. Spending hours _scared_. My psychologists organized an interview with one of the other … whatever we were; a ballerina inheriting her own teacher’s muscle memory. She’d reassured me, too, I’d still be myself. They would become me, not the other way around.

I’d read Grants’ autobiography then, or rather, the jumbled document of notes left unfinished for the far-flung future of declassification and some poor ghostwriter, which his wife had handed over to the Homeoffice _for his Inheritor_ as per his will. His unease at the lack of faces in Nightingale’s memories. _All his suits are too short for me. Half his shoes to small, the other half to large._ And his books, old, well-kept, on _paper_ , delivered to me. I tried reading some of those, too, but mostly I remember watching that old show. _Dax_ , again and again just _Dax_ – it was probably in my psychological folder, now, _for my Inheritor_ – and thinking HERE, IT HAS MEANING. IT HAS SUBSTANCE and thinking, who am I becoming, what will I have _done_ -

But it wasn’t the same, reading about someone’s actions or psyche, or even their own writing, or even knowing them, I now knew, as it was to _be_ someone.

There’d also been the letters – the one that was mostly instructions _in the not unlikely case this undertaking fails_ and very little in the way of reassurance, quick and hart and clearly written with the urgency and clarity of the old and dying, and the one trying and failing to reassure – y _ou will not be me. I will not be you. You will not be overwritten, and don't let anyone tell you so. I will become part of you, but not as he and I became me. You will be yourself, but a new you –_ which had sounded like a bunch of esoteric horseshit then, and every so often in the dark of the night of a high-security hospital like a terrifying lie.

I knew it wasn't a lie. I couldn't lie to myself anymore.

There’s secrecy, and there’s outright lying, and there’s remembering writing that first line – _The first thing I did after I got out of the hospital was visiting Leslie’s grave._ Except that it was a lie. I hadn’t. I’d gone and checked on the Folly, first, and the Library, second, and Molly – at least she’s not all on her own, this time, I thought relieved – thirdly, and _then_ Leslie’s grave, because I knew now that the horrible truth is that the venerable dead can wait a day on the living in their vaulted arches. And there’s remembering writing down the lie because the living cannot understand the dead, and there’s remembering standing at the grave of the mate I’d never met and who I’ll never get to meet and who’s back I should have had in that riot and trying not to cry and seawater in the air and hearing the new voice in my mind that spoke in a perfect RP accent and wasn’t me and was me say –

<You're not one of my apprentices.>, I said suddenly – cut me some slack, I'd just died – <Wait, how _old_ are you?> and I flinched –

‘I'm not. You don't know me’, I said, ‘I'm – I'm 19.’

< _Fuck_.>, I said, and I cringed. <Sorry, just – you could be my _daughter_. Great-Granddaughter.>

‘When did you, I mean, do this? 25, wasn't it?’

<Yeah.>, I said, and realized they’d shown me the stupid portraits, of all things. I look _old_ in those. Horribly _dignified_. _Incredibly_ white. <And eleven. But that was a different time.>

I almost huffed a laugh. ‘Is it going to feel like this all the time?’ I asked instead.

<This gets better.>, I reassured myself. <right now – right now you're 19 and terrified and have 54 and 111 years of experience and PTSD that aren't _you_ but are you, _now –_ congratulation on the Victoria Cross and Royal Medal, by the way – hot-glued to the part of your spine that's supposed to be for stuff like 'breathing while asleep' and 'swallowing'. It's going to take some time, but it won't always be like this.>

‘Do you always talk like that?’

<Yes. I apologize. Actually, scratch that, totally not sorry.>

I was still apprehensive. Still nervous.

I took a deep breath. ‘I just dropped out of Oxford for this.’, remembering how I wanted to get the most important part out of the way first. Bracing myself for the inevitable disappoin-

– The truth is, no amount of remembering that _any apparent future expressions of personal opinion or emotion or attachment not pertaining to specific memories are purely reconstructed extrapolations by the current personalities’ creativity based on the data available_ prepared me for hearing the new voice in my mind that spoke in a perfect RP accent and wasn’t me and was me say <My condolences> –

<That's probably the best decision you've ever made.>, I said.

‘What.’, I said. Wasn't I supposed to be angry at me? Or at least a bit sternly disappointed? I tried to come up with a single father – Black or otherwise, really – who'd be alright with his daughter throwing away a _scholarship_ at _Oxford_ to go and have experimental – you don't know experimental until you've been hooked up to a modified Babbage Machine, young lady – Rude? – _brain surgery_ to learn bloody _magic._

<You heard me. There's nothing better, nothing more important than this.>

‘But -’, I said, trying to reel back from the inevitable, defiantly-proud, airtight defense I was already about to mount. ‘You wouldn't say that if I was _your_ daughter.’

<My _actual_ daughter dedicated herself to counting earthworms and centipedes and what creepy-crawlies you've got in the name of science, and I will respect her – very weird – wishes.>, I said, trying to ignore the overwhelming, sudden pang of grief – ridiculous, it's not _her_ that died, was it now, she was fine, I might even get to see her again. In a few years. Maybe. – threatening to suffocate me. <Nevertheless, my point stands: Best decision you've ever made. There's nothing – and I mean, nothing, you could find at Oxford or any other posh college, better than _this_.>

The hospital lights were too bright when I blinked up at them. I was quiet for a long while, long enough that the nurses – oh, right, the nurses – started to look worried. I closed my eyes again.

‘You're really not angry?’

<I'm not your father.>, I said, gently. I really wished they hadn’t shown me the bloody portraits. Bastards. <And I'm not your teacher, or your superior officer, or any such nonsense. Better to stop thinking of me as such right now. I'm _you_. And I'm a fucking suicidal idiot who parachutes into active war zones and runs into burning buildings. I made the same stupid, _amazing_ decision you did, back in the day.>

I glossed over the _active war zones,_ and the _PTSD_ , while I was at it. I knew that, but it was different – it was going to be different from _knowing_ , wasn't it. ‘Is it? Is it amazing?’

<It is – haven't they let you do any before? Why do they keep _doing_ this – never mind. It _is_. It's awesome, actual, real, awe-inspiring. It's fucking _magic_.>

‘No.’, I said. ‘I was supposed – I'm not just going to, you know, _know_?’

<Yes? No. We'll get there. Just let them – get them to get you somewhere where we can try.>

‘There's a committee. They'll want to see.’

<There's _always_ a committee. Please tell me _Ty_ isn't on it. She hates me. Maybe she'll like us now – fair warning: she might yell, about the Oxford thing.>

‘Alright.’, I said and told the nurses about our planned adventure, who went to tell the doctors. They didn't look enthused at all about letting me leave the bed, but I found that, possibly for the first time in my life, I was completely unbothered. So it was true – nothing like age and the brazen self-satisfaction of a for once rather distinguished white guy to make one not give a single shit. ‘Any pointers?’

<Fuck your dignity and just take the wheelchair>, I said, which really hadn't been what I've meant, <and don't, under any circumstances, purposefully scare any more comedy writers into switching genre.>

I was silent for another moment, this time in slight horror before my brain caught up with the memory of that – rather inebriated – evening, and I started to giggle semi-panicky.

‘I know.’, said Mrs. Kamara – Abigail somewhere to my right, making me startle. The adrenaline and stress-fueled hysteria were almost enough to tune out the sudden pang of twenty years of almost-fatherly-proud affection – ‘He's bloody hilarious. And he never shuts up. Get used to it.’

‘They didn't tell me that.’, I gasped, and I didn't know anymore if I was laughing or crying or panicking. ‘Why didn't they tell me _that_?’

<Because they're all posh, pencil-pushing overeducated dipshits who've never worked steel and fire in their entire lives.>

And I knew then that it was true, that _they all_ had _no fucking clue_ , with almost two centuries of frustration and self-justified, self-absorbed, hard-won, deserved pride and surprisingly bitter anger at traipsing around in blood and mud and bodies and actual and metaphorical darkness on bad intel and idiotic orders and shitty pseudoscience and haughty, entitled assholes and no backup even though I _told_ you I _will_ need backup one of these days, _Sir_ , and oh god oh fuck this was going to be a lot, wasn't it, they hadn't – they couldn't have told me, _non of them_ fucking _knew_ -

Definitely hysteric. Excusable, under the circumstances, I judged.

I got myself back together a bit, stemming the tide of blood-and-dust panic, but couldn't help but fume – because that, I now knew, was better than calling it _grieving_ , which makes you lay down and not get up again – all the way through being manhandled into the wheelchair – better neurosurgery apparently did not apply to not having to relearn walking – < _again > –_ yet – I just have _vertigo_ for fucks sake – and rolled out into a courtyard under the watchful eye of an entire herd of nurses and doctors, making good first use of the very helpful fifty extra years of experience in Not Making A Scary-Stormy Face, Ever all the way.

I definitely noticed that I was less confused by now, too, and more aware of my surroundings. The fresh spring air was nice. It had been autumn when I had died, and I suddenly wondered how the apprentices were holding up without me. <Probably bending all their _formae_ out of shape.>

<Some actual advice>, I said. <Don't burn me out too much, turn me off, if you can manage it somehow, or ->

‘Or I'll get brain damage.’, I said. ‘Accumulative, but still. They told me that much, at least.’

<Great. Do not over-do the magic either, even with the staff – you won't have me there to help you, then, and you don't have the experience to tell how far you can go yet.>

‘Or? Wait, let me guess. The answer is: _More_ brain damage.’

None of the medical staff seemed to think it was weird that I was talking to myself, or they were at least very good at pretending.

<Precisely that.>

‘You're serious.’

<Deadly.>

‘You know’, said Abigail-Mrs-Kamara, almost conspiratorially. ‘Peter used to say he was 'being a right Thomas' about things.’

It’s tempting, when reconstructing, to tell yourself you’re smarter than you are. Or rather, to tell yourself that you knew then, that it came to you all in that moment, and you Knew, but the truth is that generally, these kind of things come slowly. Not like slowly waking up to it, though. At some point, you know, and then you continue on a while knowing but not aware, carefully taking that fragile, scary knowledge you found about yourself out of it’s Pandora’s box and poke at it a bit and sometimes it spills all over your lap and you have to stuff it back, but when you pack it back, it’s gone again. You’re aware of the things you know you don’t know you know, until some day you know them. What I mean is, it would be so tempting to say that I knew then, in that very moment, that something was wrong with us –

I’m not supposed to think of I as Us. I’ve been advised on that quiet clearly by my psychological handlers, every time.

I tried to remember which one of us had had the chat with the ballerina.

‘Oh, is that it.’, I said. ‘Am I pulling a face?’

She nodded and asked me if I was ready. I lied that I was.

A white, actually-nice smiling - <young> \- middle-aged doctor - <Jennifer Vaughan> \- peeled off from my entourage, and I waded through another pang of unexpected grief, this time like the fresh, painful gap of a missing tooth. Someone was _missing_. She must have seen a flash of it, and smiled even kinder, as if she knew, as if we were old friends - <we are old friends> \- and I didn't like it at all and also felt like I might need a hug. Someone squeezed my shoulder, and I thought it was probably Abigail. Doctor Vaughan went to set up a camera a good ten meters from me, and another one even further out, still looking so damn encouraging, and I tried to tune out all the eyes on me and breathe through my nerves.

‘So how do I -’

One of the nurses, helpfully – helpfully, he probably thought – went for my neck, and I caught his wrist with a larger and stronger hand than mine. ‘Not. You.’, I said sharply, and with a sudden posh, _properly_ posh accent, startling myself and the nurse. I let go as if I had burned myself, and the nurse stumbled backwards. ‘I'm going to need to get that under control, fast.’

<We don't have to talk to ourselves>, I said. <It works if you, kind of, think _at_ me, too.>

I tried _Like This?_ It was an unsettling feeling – as if the imaginary voice of my own thoughts had been replaced. It had been replaced. I remembered this.

 _So how do I do this_ , I asked again.

<You know the forma>, I said. I did. <You know how to do it already. I do, so you do too. When you turn us off, it's going to leave. Keep it in _your_ mind. Hold on to the _shape_ of it.>

‘Alright.’, I said. ‘Shape. Hold the shape. Do the – thing.’

<Magic.>

‘Yeah’, I said, feeling giddy. I didn't think I was someone who was _giddy_ about things. I didn’t know how to feel about that one. Maybe it would go away again? It didn’t feel that bad. ‘Let's do some magic.’

Abigail squeezed my shoulder again. I kept forgetting her hand was even _there_.

<Before you turn me off, I forgot to ask: What did you want to read? At Oxford? I'm sorry – I get distracted. A lot.>

‘I noticed.’ The honesty made me smile. ‘Law.’, I said. ‘I wanted to be a lawyer.’

If we aren't the law, what are we then, I thought then, like one, like an old memory, harsh and wonderful enough to make me want to cry, and this. All of this. Was still a lot. It was going to be a lot to get used to, but I felt, almost, as if I might just manage.

I did lose the shape again, though. Even if just for a moment.

Fumbling around with my own numb, janky, fingers for the switch was harder than I thought and I had half a mind to ask the nurses to help me after all. The Imago was a lot less clunky than the first ones – the difference 30 years in tech make, I guess – and the scar tissue around the especially for us engineered ports flatter and not at all gnarly. The ports themselves were warm, and I found the closed-over slit for the replacement cartridges before the little gliding hatch covering the dead-switch for my brain. You don't notice when you get turned off, you jus

**Author's Note:**

> References:
> 
> Hozier's _Almost (Sweet Music)_  
>  Thomas Parnell’s _A Night-Piece on Death_  
>  The DEATH quote is from _The Truth_  
>  In S01 E08 “Dax”, Jadzia Dax is put on trial for a murder allegedly committed by Curzon Dax


End file.
